Is Amazon’s Kindle Ebook Reader a Money-Making Opportunity for Authors and Publishers?
Jeff Bezos changed the way people choose and buy books when he started Amazon. For many authors, Amazon has been a lifeline, breathing new life into books that had long since stopped being stocked by most bookshops. Amazon’s clever reader reviews, recommendations and “people who bought this also bought” feature have pulled dusty, forgotten books from the back of the store and stuck them in the front window again. Now Bezos and the Amazon team are taking their revolution one step further. On November 16, 2007, they finally launched their much-anticipated electronic-book reader, the Kindle. This new device is intended to make reading a book as easy and pleasurable on a portable screen as it is on paper. The big advantages the device has are that it can store more than 200 books, it can easily be updated with new books and it is light and portable. Most books, including new best sellers, cost $9.99. Some classics can be downloaded for as little as $1.99. Subscriptions to newspapers, magaz
